Paul Johnson: Art, Presence, Sacrifice: The Death and Rebirth of the Cleveland “Thinker"

The esoteric "religious" powers of figurative sculpture appear most vividly in iconoclastic acts of destruction taken against them. Such acts reveal an ambivalence in iconoclasts’ relationships with these artworks, a simultaneous attraction to their nearhuman quality, which allows sculptures to serve as ritual substitutes for live persons, as scapegoats, and a repulsion to them that motivates the attack. Paradoxically, iconoclastic attacks help to produce artworks as sacred—as incarnational, presence-bearing forms. To show this, I consider the case of the 1970 bombing of Rodin’s “Thinker” in Cleveland as an act of ritual sacrifice; a sculpture “killed” as though it were a condemned person. Instead of destroying it, though, the iconoclasts animated it. The cast of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Thinker now pulses with life in a way unlike any other version. Damaged by the blast, wrenched apart, its base a jagged plume, the Thinker’s ripped legs and hollowed torso open now to a distinct kind of nearhuman agency, as martyr.